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> Blub I love the blub paradox story[0]. If you hadn't mentioned it, I was going to. The central idea is, each language lives at a particular spot on a 'power

> Blub I love the blub paradox story[0]. If you hadn't mentioned it, I was going to. The central idea is, each language lives at a particular spot on a 'power spectrum' -- perhaps 'expressiveness spectrum' is more accurate since theoretically any Turing-equiv lang is technically as powerful as the others. When you look down the power spectrum, at less-expressive languages, it's easy to scoff and say "I can't believe that language is missing Feature X of my chosen language." But when you look up the spectrum (and in the article, LISP is the example given), the more powerful features in that language just look like nonsense. The money quote is "Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub." For me, my primary language is C#. When I look at Go, I can't help but think "I can't believe it doesn't have generics, how can anyone get anything done in it?" But when I look at LISP metaprogramming, I get uncomfortable with my lack of understanding. Luckily I am a language nerd so I force myself to experience languages at all ends of the spectrum. Highly recommended read. [0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

klibertp 8y ago
> Luckily I am a language nerd Oh, hi there, always good to meet others with the same hobby ;) Yeah, the Blub essay is well-written and it influenced my thinking significantly when I read it for the first time. It was one of the reasons I started asking myself: "what other above-Blub languages are there, and what features do they boast?" and made me become a language nerd ;) Many years later, after actually experiencing a whole lot of niche languages and wandering close to the verge of insanity countless times, I concluded that the "expressive power" is not that simple to define, that its definition can change over time (the essay is from 2001!). It's easy to imagine languages placed on steps of a ladder, where more expressive ones occupy higher positions. It can be a good mental model in practice when considering relatively similar languages, too. The problem is, there are languages which use entirely different ladders! From the perspective of all languages on Blubby ladder, they set out to solve different problems, assume completely different contexts of use, use completely alien computation models, in short: work in a fundamentally different way. It's not that they're not general-purpose languages, but still, directly comparing "expressive power" of Forth, Joy, Lisp, Prolog, Smalltalk, Clean, Idris, APL, Rebol with BASIC, Pascal, C/++/#, PHP, Python, JS and the likes just feels off somehow :) In other words, I believe that the phenomenon of language expressive power is not based simply on the number of features the language implements and even how advanced they are - it's got to be more complex than that. To me, rather than a single ladder, it looks like a 3d surface with randomly erected hills, where groups of similar languages gather around and below the local maxima. It's not certain if the relative heights of the hills are comparable in some way or if that comparison would have any meaning. It was actually very pleasant realization: as I was heading towards the top of the ladder (starting at Pascal and C level), I stopped to look around and suddenly discovered that from this high up I can see a whole lot more hills worth climbing! Anyway, whatever your approach and route would be, learning new languages is always good. Learning the concepts behind them gives you more mental tools for problem-solving, and learning about their internals often leads to a much better understanding of the concepts. Plus, forcing oneself to experience all of that is fun in its own right :)

klibertp 8y ago

> Luckily I am a language nerd Oh, hi there, always good to meet others with the same hobby ;) Yeah, the Blub essay is well-written and it influenced my thinking significantly when I read it for the first time. It was one of the reasons I started asking myself: "what other above-Blub languages are there, and what features do they boast?" and made me become a language nerd ;) Many years later, after actually experiencing a whole lot of niche languages and wandering close to the verge of insanity countless times, I concluded that the "expressive power" is not that simple to define, that its definition can change over time (the essay is from 2001!). It's easy to imagine languages placed on steps of a ladder, where more expressive ones occupy higher positions. It can be a good mental model in practice when considering relatively similar languages, too. The problem is, there are languages which use entirely different ladders! From the perspective of all languages on Blubby ladder, they set out to solve different problems, assume completely different contexts of use, use completely alien computation models, in short: work in a fundamentally different way. It's not that they're not general-purpose languages, but still, directly comparing "expressive power" of Forth, Joy, Lisp, Prolog, Smalltalk, Clean, Idris, APL, Rebol with BASIC, Pascal, C/++/#, PHP, Python, JS and the likes just feels off somehow :) In other words, I believe that the phenomenon of language expressive power is not based simply on the number of features the language implements and even how advanced they are - it's got to be more complex than that. To me, rather than a single ladder, it looks like a 3d surface with randomly erected hills, where groups of similar languages gather around and below the local maxima. It's not certain if the relative heights of the hills are comparable in some way or if that comparison would have any meaning. It was actually very pleasant realization: as I was heading towards the top of the ladder (starting at Pascal and C level), I stopped to look around and suddenly discovered that from this high up I can see a whole lot more hills worth climbing! Anyway, whatever your approach and route would be, learning new languages is always good. Learning the concepts behind them gives you more mental tools for problem-solving, and learning about their internals often leads to a much better understanding of the concepts. Plus, forcing oneself to experience all of that is fun in its own right :)